


So Musical A Discord

by Erradianwhocantread



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Body Horror, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Other, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-18
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-07-13 18:38:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 26
Words: 12,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16023671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erradianwhocantread/pseuds/Erradianwhocantread
Summary: Song inspired mini-fics from my tumblr





	1. Chapter 1

Arwen was a scion of two and more far-sighted houses, many and many times over. Yet she did not have the gift, or at least not what she would call a Gift. Perhaps she did, perhaps that was all there was to it, putting all the pieces, even the smallest and seemingly insignificant ones, together so that you were almost never surprised. Perhaps there was never any magic or divinity in it. Perhaps all her forebears had embellished, in the way of Elves, what was merely sharp-wittedness. Arwen wouldn’t put it past them, and she wouldn’t call being sharp and observant an extrasensory endowment of divine grace. 

Whether foresight or cynical extrapolation based on observation, she knew her grandmother would not make an appearance at her nuptials, should they take place.

She remembered, clearly, the last time Galadriel had ventured outside of the mausoleum disguised as a wood she called her home. Her mother had still been well, and she herself had still been young enough, still naive enough, to believe her grandmother was still the brash and willful Artanis of song and story. She had appeared as an emissary from another world, a promise of what had, and what could again, be for those such as themselves, a queen high and radiant. 

But the dazzlement had not lasted. Arwen had travelled to the Golden Wood not long (by the measurement of Elves) after her mother had sailed west, and she had seen the truth behind the gloss then. Galadriel’s spirit was as thin and spotted and worn as the skin of the ancient and aged Dunedain that sheltered in Imladris, as toothless and weighed by old griefs and bereft of action as the crones who stooped and limped in the Hall of Fire. Only her ever-youth shielded her from exposure. Arwen had been disgusted at the hypocrisy in the revelation.

She had made her Choice that day. Her body and her spirit would tell the same story. She would not wear outward lies, as her mother’s people did, as the people of her father’s Choice did. She wondered, sometimes, if her long-dead uncle had seen the same horror written on the spirits of the Feanorions her father would not speak of, if that fear of wearing thin without wearing out, the seductive promise of not having to endure and endure and endure and endure and still continue on, had lured Tar Minyatur out of the circles of the world.

It was not until many lifetimes of Men later, when she walked over the crunching leaves of the Golden Wood’s final autumn, that she could once again think on her grandmother with awe. For though loss upon loss had been piled upon her, it was the loss of mortal span: parents, siblings, spouse, peers, and a world and body she could freely use, and all of these she must face but once. If loss was death and death was loss, she would face it but once. But for her deathless kin, it was a hydra.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aredhel and Elwing share a moment in Valinor post-silm

There had been no one on the deserted shore a moment ago, only seabirds, Aredhel was sure of that. Her senses had been sharp in her early years in Aman as a hunter, sharp as a warrior in Beleriand, sharpened beyond measure as prey. She was not mistaken. And yet a figure now stood on one of the jagged rocks standing in doomed defiance against the surging tide. She was grey and solemn, and, had Aredhel not been able to tell with ease the difference between one of the Powers and one of the Eruhini, she would have thought it was the Lady of Sorrows, between her sudden appearance and her demeanor. 

And yet there was something of Power about the strange figure, and something also of ephemera, as she had only ever seen in the Atani. She was a Power, and yet not so, Eldar, and not so, Atani, and not so, and the sea mist warped about her in a way that was chillingly familiar, and yet not so. Aredhel had felt this compelling confusion before, had put too much faith in herself and in the goodness of her own kind, ought to be wiser now, on the other side of Mandos. But this creature did not seem dangerous (he had not seemed dangerous either, not at first), and her melancholy which rose and fell with the waves and called with the voices of the gulls overhead was as familiar to Aredhel as the rest of her was strange. 

Without turning her gaze from the fuzzy fold of the sky into the sea, the figure spoke, her accent strange, her tone bitter and regal. “Why have you come to my beach, Noldo?”

The stranger’s spirit roiled and crashed, long grief and resignation surging against loss and rage at loss, righteous determination sometimes glinting in the depths, and the sea and the gulls seemed to answer to it, or call back to it, or echo it, as they would Osse, and yet the figure seemed as small and insignificant before the endless grey expanse of the sea as a Man did outlined against the stars. 

“I came to mourn a freedom I will never know again, and to curse myself for failing a child I should never have had,” answered Aredhel. 

The stranger smiled, the gulls gave a harsh shriek of mirth, and the foam burbled in a depress in a rock by Aredhel’s feet. “Then you have come for the same reason as I have.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elenwe makes a choice

The conventional wisdom amongst the Noldor was the metaphysical philosophy which focused on speculation about the unknowable mind of Iluvatar was a Vanya’s game, by which they of course meant a frivolity. It amused Elenwe, as she listened to Feanaro’s impassioned vision of an escape from a golden cage in the mingled light of torches and stars, standing with her chosen family in the streets of Tirion, to reflect that she had reached these conclusions centuries ago, in one of her frivolous Vanyarin games. They never ought to have come here in the first place. 

The path back, she knew, as it was common knowledge among Ingwe’s folk, would now lead only into darkness, into pain, into wild and fruitless wanderings. A river once diverted can never be set back into its bed, and attempting to do so only ever created more disturbance. She doubted very much that Feanaro minded that prospect. She wasn’t sure she minded it either. It was not the fiery words that stirred the longing for a homeland she had never seen, for she had felt it, as most did if they dug deep enough into themselves and could recognize it for what it was, for most of her life. 

As the purpose of the heir apparent to the leadership of the Noldor became clearer and clearer as the speech wore on, Turukano turned to her. Itarile had cried herself to sleep on his shoulder. His face was tight with trepidation. “I will return as soon as the Moringotto is brought to justice.You understand why I must go?”

Elenwe looked at him, puzzled. “Why would we return?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Merry and Pippin have a nice moment

At least once a day, for as long as they’d known each other, something came out of Pippin’s mouth that was completely unlike anything Merry had ever thought she would here in her entire life. Just yesterday, they had been lying on a hillside looking up at the sky, tufts of grass bobbing from their mouths in mockery of the farmers laboring down below when Pip had, utterly out of the blue, queried “How far d’you suppose those clouds traveled before they got to us?”

Merry had had no idea. It had never occurred to her to wonder how far a cloud could travel, only to note the direction, speed and type. It was a terribly whimsical question, not the sort of thing your average Hobbit would care to waste thought on. Merry had laughed and quipped back that she reckoned a few of the stodgier sort over in Hobbiton would judge them harshly if it was more than a league, and shudder to think of foreign drops falling on their well-tended gardens, and they’d both laughed themselves stupid at the way such knowledge would turn Lobelia Sackville-Baggins’s face like a crab-apple. 

And once they were done laughing, Pippin had turned to her, and with surprising studiousness, asked again “But really, Merry, how far do you think a cloud travels?”

“Ask Gandalf next time he traipses through town, just to make sure he remembers not to visit too often, why don’t you?” Merry had suggested glibly.

Pippin threw a wad of grass at her. “Do you any come from as far as the Lonely Mountain? Or the Sea?”

“You sound as if you’d been talking to Gaffer Gamgee’s lad, you know that, right?”

Pippin propped herself up on her elbows and looked aghast at her. “Meriadoc Brandybuck. How  _dare_  you accuse me of  _fancy_! I will have you know I am trying to decide exactly how much I can plausibly scandalize our most respectable neighbors with the truth about where their rain comes from!”

In retrospect, Merry decided that that was the day she’d fallen head over fuzzy heels for the most insolent Took to ever trouble the Shire.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maedhros deals with death and her conscience

“I will not concede it.”

Silence was the only answer. It always was.

“With the information we had at the time it made the most sense.”

But that was, of course, the problem with all decisions. In a moment, the information available changed, and so wisdom changed its course. 

“Such was the course Fingolfin chose, wait and see, and see where that got her.”

Nothing made any argument against her, nothing ever did.

“And I will not concede that we were wholly to blame. You and your ilk had opportunity piled upon opportunity to intervene, and yet you did nothing, again and again.”

Nothing responded with nothing.

“And I will also not concede that failing to act is less evil than acting, in the case of mass murder. Or in the case of allowing one’s siblings to commit murder under one’s command.”

“Nor will I concede that it was without hope.”

Doom and History, which were inherently hopeless, did not deign to respond.

“You, perhaps, have seen how things ought to go. Perhaps, also, through an understanding of patterns, you know what the weave in the tapestry must next hold. But we cannot. And it is written into the fabric of existence that our choices may change the course of things.”

The silence stretched out for eternity in all directions.

“You would remind me that, in this case, they did not.”

Maedhros let the silence stretch out around her. She knew the answer she ought to give. She had known the answer at the camp, at Sirion, at Menegroth, at Losgar, at Alqualonde, and in the torch-lit streets of Tirion. And yet.

“I will not concede that we were wrong to try where you despaired. I will not concede that we were wrong to try still when all hope was lost. If that is the price of freedom, then so be it.”

She had squared off against worse than her own conscience, worse than the grim silence of the Doomsman, and had not yielded. She would not yield now.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pippin assesses elven culture

Sam, ever the bumpkin, was overawed by the Elves. Pippin knew better. Of course she did. She was, after all, far smarter than anyone gave her credit for, smarter and more discerning than most. And how impressive could anyone really be who wandered around the countryside in the dark and slept in hedges? How truly civilized could a people be if they didn’t have tea regularly, or smoke pipes? Oh yes, she saw through their tricks, their shining and their height and their elegance and the way they spoke about nothing at all and things so long ago that they didn’t matter at all in the most confusing ways possible. Just as good old Bilbo had. And so while Sam gaped like a fool and Frodo bowed and deferred to these creatures and Merry… well, Merry was Merry, Pippin put her plan into action. Rivendell would be her oyster in a matter of days. If Bilbo could wrap them all about his little finger like that without any of the mystery or magnificent treasure he’d used in Hobbiton, then Pippin, with all her spectacular natural gifts, could do it in half the time. She even re-evaluated Strider. She’d taken the Ranger as being on her level when it came to seeing the true way of things and being a few steps ahead of most, but since they’d arrived, the Ranger had been nearly as taken in by Elven parlor tricks as the rest. 

And so when some gangly long-haired person whose name she hadn’t bothered to remember told her that they would be singing some song or other from the first age (whenever  _that_ was) that was apparently accounted great for some reason and asked if she was like other Hobbits (by which they meant Bilbo, their only point of reference) and enjoyed songs, she yawned dramatically and informed them that she found nothing interesting in dusty old tales.

“Which is why, Peregrin Took, no one finds anything at all interesting inside that head of yours!”

Pippin had decided that not only did Gandalf have terrible taste and worse timing, but that his habit of sneaking up on her with insults was positively almost half as bad as the most distressing lack of mattresses and hot water in the wilderness.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fingon and Maedhros have a Relationship Talk post-Thangorodrim

“Your mother came to see me today.” Maitimo’s voice was neutral as she looked out the window of the room that doubled as council chamber and sick-room. “It seems she has somehow discovered our situation. She has some opinions on what we ought to do about it.”

Findekano did not ask the obvious follow-up. She sat in uneasy silence, waiting for Maitimo to continue. It was clear to her that Maitimo would rather their marriage had remained secret, still, even after everything. It was not hard to imagine she was angry about it becoming known to Nolofinwe. Findekano bit back the impulse to apologize and explain. She owed neither, and neither would help.

Maitimo continued staring blankly at the young tree outside her window. She was looking better, but better was not saying much. She was still too thin, too pale, and weary in some way that no amount of sleep seemed to help. And she was closed, walled off as Aman was now walled off. Findekano might have been sitting across from a stranger, or, more accurately, one of Nerdanel’s statues. She would have gotten more than this from a stranger.

“Nolofinwe seems to think it necessary that we perform the rituals for that which we had long since made reality.”

“And what do you think?” Findekano had not had to ask her so earnestly since she’d been short enough out from her majority that it was still worth counting. To have absolutely no inkling, no indication, of how her beloved felt that she did not have to glean from outward guesses felt wrong like the streets of Tirion lit only by torchlight had felt wrong. 

Maitimo was silent for a long time. The bird twittering in the tree only made the silence worse. “I think,” she said at last, “that it would go a long way to forwarding the reconciliation of our people if we were to be seen to formalize a union.” 

Still nothing. Findekano was appalled. Her own beloved sat there talking of their marriage as one would talk of trades or of a seating arrangement at an official function, as if this were a tedious matter of appearances. After all of it. The vicious thought that perhaps Turukano may have been right about Maitimo flashed through her mind, followed by the excuses she’d been making ever since she’d pulled her off Thorondor’s back: she was injured more deeply in spirit than in body, she must be given time, and care, and she could not be blamed for what the Moringotto had done to her. Findekano rubbed her eyes and pushed both aside. She remembered the shock an distress that had rolled from Maitimo when the ships had cast off while Nolofinwe’s folk were still on the beach, the frantic promise that had followed. She remembered the flickers of shame, of grief, of rage next to her own as she’d watched the great flames across the Sea. She remembered the faint but insistent presence in her mind on the ice, stubborn and persistent, fiery. And she remembered how utterly  _naked_ Maitimo had been when she’d found her and during the early stretch of her recovery, her mind exposed in a way it never should have been. And she hoped that under the scars and the shame and the armor, the warm and generous spirit of the Maitimo she’d bonded herself to remained.

“I cannot pretend to enter into union with you for the sake of our people, any more than I could feign a loyalty which I did not feel.” Maitimo looked sharply at Findekano, and Findekano could have guessed the effect of those words if she’d cared to, but still she would have to guess. “If what you desire is a show, and then more of this,” Findekano deliberately bounced herself off the unyielding walls surrounding Maitimo’s mind, “then I cannot agree to it. I will be your wife in full, or not at all. And if you cannot… if that is no longer something you can… then I will be your truest friend. But I cannot pretend to be your wife, and I would never have you pretend to be mine.” 

A spasm reverberated across their bond, and Maitimo’s face once again went carefully blank. A crack like a forced smile rent itself into the walls around her mind. “As you wish.”

Findekano recoiled, sickened. She remembered the hints she’d gathered of what the Enemy had done, added this to the damnable collection. “No! no. Have you forgotten? I have never wanted anything other than what you would  _freely_ give. If,  _if,_ Maitimo, what you will freely give is yourself, as you have done, then I will delight in it. If what you will freely give is your companionship, and nothing of your mind, then I will delight in that. And if… if what you may freely give is your continued residence in your body, and nothing else, then I will delight that you live and are free.”

“Suppose I do not know?” Maitimo asked, her voice small and distant.

“Then I will wait until you do! And I will stand by you, and love you, even if you never know. But I will neither have you as my wife if you do not wish it, nor will I feign a bond that… may no longer stand.” She could not say broken. “And as for Nolofinwe, I can handle my mother.”

They sat again in uncomfortable silence. The bird had left its singing. Findekano watched the shadows move across the room, still pleased with the strange novelty of it. At last, Maitimo spoke. “I would… I think that I would… like to be able to… to do as Nolofinwe suggests. With sincerity. But I would also like to be able to use a sword again, and I… doubt…”

“When you doubt no longer, Maitimo Nelyafinwe, then I will meet you under the stars, that we may join each to each. But not until then.” Findekano rose and walked from the room.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maedhros at the Dagor Bragollach

Smoke choked the air and their throats. Ash fell like snow onto their clothes. The sinking sun glowed a dull red as it hung in a lurid yellow sky. The ash was not the ash of ships, or of wood, or of the strange flames at the heart of the earth. It was their comrades, their kin, their homes, the quick plants of Ard Galen. Maedhros coughed, and wondered which of Angrod and Aegnor’s folk it was she’d breathed in. North and west, the Mountains of Shadow still glowed in triumphant reds, oranges, yellows. They had been fools. It had taken the force of all the Valar to subdue their wayward sibling before. Somehow in their madness they had believed their fragment could do it unaided. She had seen fire put to horrible uses in Angband. She had as good as put fire to hateful use herself. But never, never had any of them beheld  _this._ Some of the Atani had told her with a certainty she had found quaint and baffling at the time that the world would end in a ravening fire that would devour it entirely, turning Arda into a giant cinder floating in Void. She had chuckled to hear it at the time. Now she saw that they were right. It had been told, in Aman, that the Morgoth first had prevented the completion of Arda, and the awakening of the Eruhini, by wreathing all its vastness in endless fire, to its great delight. And it intended to reduce the earth to flames and smoke and ash once more, until there was nothing left to burn, until even the secret fires at its heart were spent. Maedhros had seen its mind, and today they had all seen its power. And this time there would be no Valar to stop it. The Atani, somehow, had understood this when they had not. Maedhros understood it now. Across the smoking and blackened plain, on the far edge of her sight, she saw a star flying like the winds that had kissed the grasses that were no more towards Angband, and she knew Fingolfin understood too. 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turgon in the distance between the body and the halls of Mandos

Somehow, what came after was worse.

After the pounding despair and guilt, after the animal terror that devoured reason, after the fall and the crush of stones on head, on back, on limbs, after the pulverizing stones mixed flesh, bone, organs, armor, and dust into a gory paste… after was worse.

Dark was not the word. Unmoored, a ship that had lost all its crew, sails flapping, blown on an endless sea, no port… Uprooted, a tree wrenched from soil by a whirlwind, all its connections to the earth, to its vital systems, to its fellows snapped and dangling… Snuffed, no more the candle any longer but the whisp of smoke floating, floating, floating…

No sense of where or when or even of who (what did any of those mean without a body?), groping, blown and buffeted, doomed. That much stuck. They had all been doomed, were so doomed, to die, to die, to die, by fire and water, in light and in darkness, in manners great and mundane, at the hands of their foes and of their friends, in the height of their power and in the depths of weakness, they must die and die and die, and float and float and float, no body, nobody, and alone, evermore.

There was a call, and they followed. The direction of the wind changed, and they were blown along with it, dry leaves of past autumn glory into a dark sea. There was a point of light, and they flew towards it like a moth. And in this Null… terror could not be felt without the mechanisms of the flesh, and this was not terror.

This was worse.

This was what it was to be doomed and uhoused and compelled and seen and called and to know neither who was calling or who called, save that it was they themself, and that they must follow.

This was to be reeled in like a fish, swept towards a waterfall on a raft, blown to a lee shore, with only the barest awareness of something too vast and no capacity for resistance. Worse than hopeless.

They were Despair and then It had them and they were

“ _Turukano”_

He was dead and he was doomed but he knew himself, he knew himself, and he knew the one who had called his spirit here and given him back his name, and he knew here to be the Halls of Waiting, and though he wait here until the breaking of the world, it was well, it was well, it was well.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Legolas and Gimli discuss meeting each others families, post-canon

Returning home was not something that either of them had reckoned on. The world had been ending. They hadn’t planned for any after. They certainly hadn’t planned for explaining this, whatever this was, to their respective families.

And yet here they sat, paddling their feet in the cool waters of the long lake, hand in hand, without the slightest clue how to proceed.

They’d skirted Mirkwood. Legolas’s longing for the trees of his home was far weaker than his anxiety at realizing the full implications, for the first time, of what he’d done. They’d also skirted the Lonely Mountain for similar reasons.

They hadn’t been this shy since the Golden Wood, when their fingers had brushed accidentally, like trees in the breeze. Their hands were tentatively entwined, their cheeks flushed, and their gazes set deliberately out into the mist that covered the lake. 

The full moon was high in the sky when Legolas spoke. “No one has dwelt in the halls of my father in my memory who was not an elf,” he said, more to the mist on the water than to Gimli, “would you like to be the first exception?”

Gimli could have reminded his spouse that he would hardly be the first non-Elf to repose in the halls of the Elvenking. He could have reminded him that his father had been one among fourteen to do so, and in circumstances much less desirable than those Legolas proposed. He could have done that, but he didn’t.

Those had been dark times, when the Necromancer had been at work, who was now destroyed. It was forgivable for those under such attack to be suspicious, as it was forgivable for a people brought so low from such great heights to be so full of pride at what they knew their own true measure to be. Their fathers had failed to understand each other. But that was no reason they should make the same errors of translation.

Gimli leaned himself against Legolas, pressing the side of his head into the lithe upper arm, pressing his arm into the Elf’s side. He let out a long and contented breath before answering. 

“I would be happy, Prince of the Woodland Realm and Prince Under the Mountain,” he felt the Elf blush at that, and it jolted the entire length of his spine. He still wasn’t used to the shared sensations. “To be your guest in your father’s halls. Though you must after see the forest my father and his kin have carved in his halls.”

“I look forward to it,” said Legolas, and Gimli felt the smile, and the fragile warmth that grew in his spouse’s breast. He turned his head and kissed his shoulder.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pippin thinks about Gandalf's death

The night was not particularly cold, but even so Pippin had wrapped herself tightly in as many of the Elves’ blankets as possible. A light breeze had the branches around their platform whispering to each other, and in the dark, even all the wholesomeness of this land could not keep fouler memories of whispering leaves and being surrounded by trees from her mind. Sam snorted loudly in his sleep and she started in her cocoon of blankets and inched closer to the grey outline of another blanket-pile.

“Merry, are you asleep?”

The bundle turned over. “No,” Merry said in a low voice, “Every time I’m close I think, what if I roll over too much in my sleep and fall off the edge, and then every time I think of falling I think of… I think of Gandalf.”

“I don’t know how Sam does it,” said Pippin after another spectacular snore jolted the night air. “After this I’d suspect he’d even be able to sleep on a boat.”

Merry let out a heavy breath that was as far from mirth as it was possible to get. “Do you think he’s still falling, Pippin?” she asked, her voice small and quavering. “I knew our road would be difficult, even before we left the Shire. But no matter how Strider and all the rest talked of little hope and doom and falling down into darkness… I don’t think I really believed it.”

It wasn’t their way, for Merry to be the one who was scared and worried. It had always been Merry who had had courage and advice and quips for Pippin. And now that their positions were reversed, Pippin hadn’t the slightest idea what to do. “I never realized he could die,” she said. “I didn’t think they made problems that were too big for him, that his magic or his cleverness couldn’t get him out of.” Below the shock, and above the sick and final belief in what had happened creeping up from below, there lay anger; anger that the wizard would take a foolish course like that and leave them all alone on this dark road. And not just at him, because “It’s all my fault.” The trees nodded in the wind as if to agree with her. “If I hadn’t dropped the stone down that well, the Orcs might never have noticed us, and we’d never have been caught like that, and he’d still be… he’d still be–”

“I don’t think so,” said Merry, slowly, gently, almost like herself. She inched herself closer until she could wrap Pippin under her blankets. “Maybe that thing in the water tipped them off. Or maybe they would have found us anyway. Strider keeps saying how the,” Merry suddenly seemed to remember that their breathing had been too loud for the Elves earlier and instead made a circle with two of her fingers over a third. “It draws all manner of evil things to it. Like bait on a hook. And you know he’d call you a fool for thinking that.” 

Pippin burst into tears.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gandalf thinks about Tom Bombadil 
> 
> (warning for some body horror)

Anger did not become him. It was the reason Irmo had suggested that he might benefit from Nienna’s tutelage. And Olorin had benefited, but not in the way Irmo meant him to. If anything, time with the Lady of Sorrows had only honed his frustrations. And the one the Elves called Iarwain Ben-Adar ignited them like perhaps no other. Perhaps, Olorin mused as his body slowly reassembled itself, as his spirit gradually contorted itself to fit within its specific parameters, it was because Iarwain had entered Arda at the first, and he had come when called, to help rescue it from the ravaging fire of Melkor. To save the world from darkness and flame was nothing more or less than his Purpose, his whole reason for being in it. Not so for his not-quite-wayward sibling, who seemed immune to the concept of urgency. Yet urgency, burning, driving urgency, to right these wrongs, halt this senseless destruction before it was too late, that fueled and consumed him. His cloak (and name) had been grey as the ash of pity which lay over the glowering coals of his bottomless, sorrowful rage at the  _pain_ those two had introduced in this world, the sheer  _weight_ of it. And it needn’t have been that way! It wasn’t  _supposed_ to be that way!

He had tried, many times before his name had been Gandalf, and many times since, to coax a meaningful action (or even a reaction) from his sibling, all for naught. Laughter and naught. 

Fingernails, he was up to. He hated those. The sensation of them growing out of the skin was vile enough when it happened at incarnate pace. This acceleration.. how did they bear it?

It would be less frustrating if Iarwain Ben-Adar, or Tom Bombadil, or whatever fool thing he chose to call himself, didn’t have a point. They’d gone back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, for long ages of the earth, until Olorin was ready to explode, before he’d gotten to the bottom of it, and then he wished he had not. How had he not noticed it then? He could not blame the oversight on his weakened state, for he had not seen it earlier. 

The fault, Iarwain had contended, was not in action, nor in inaction, but in the very fabric of Being. The Music itself had been corrupted, and all this, all they could ever do or be, was the Music, playing out to its conclusion as it had when they’d sung it. All they could ever do, all that could ever be done, was within its confines. Iarwain had contended that it was still beautiful, its manifestation worth revelment, and the apostasy of Melkor and his followers to be scorned, or laughed at, or ignored entirely, but that changing it for the better was beyond them. And so worry and care and entanglement ought to be as well. 

He had forgotten teeth were worse, far worse, than fingernails. Why had he agreed to this?

Because to not would be to admit Iarwain, that rhyming, giggling, frivolous fool was right. That there was nothing at all to be done against  _one of their own_! And Olorin would never concede that, though he had to face Void and teeth and Balrogs and fingernails and Tooks, he would never concede that.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Merry and Pippin think about each other while they are separated

Merry crept out of the Lady Eowyn’s tent in the still hour before dawn began to cause the dark to blush. The dew was thick on the grass, and the stars gleamed in the moonless sky. Around the camp, there were many noises of horses and of men. She had, after all this, yet to grow accustomed to their loudness. She shivered in the crisp cold of that strange hour, gazing up and the unnumbered and wheeling stars ahead, and let the rage that had kept her from sleep flow up to them. Grief and worry and betrayal had, over the days since Gandalf had departed with Pippin for Gondor, morphed into a burning, burning fury like nothing that had gripped her since this whole business started. What right did that wizard have, to take her dearest and closest companion from her, to whisk Pippin of to who-knew-what, into danger, when poor Pip was already fighting some dark and evil curse! How dare he order her to stay behind, when Elrond even had not separated them, after they’d stuck together through Uruks and dark forests and everything! Merry had wept, bitterly, at their parting, had wept again every time she’d forgotten that Pippin was gone away. But she was done weeping. She let the starlight fall into her. She would not be like Treebeard, like the Ents, who lost their wives and never looked for them, never found them again. Blast that wizard, and blast Sauron, and blast those who thought she needed to stay safe at home  _now_. She knew Pippin was out there, and that this army was going to where she was, and every long ride that brought them closer to the danger that her Lady longed for brought her closer to Pippin. Looking up at the stars, Merry smiled. Gandalf had not reckoned on the strength of her friendship in Hobbiton, nor in Rivendell, and he did not reckon on it now. She looked forward to showing him up again almost as much as she looked forward to the look on Pippin’s face when she came riding in like a horse lord to rescue her.

 

 

Pippin had had fitful dreams again, as she had every night since she’d looked into the Palantir. In the dark hour before dawn she awoke, and knew she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. She padded across the rugs covering the white stone floor and looked out her window, at the white city cloaked in grey under the cold light of the stars above. She missed Pippin more than anything, more even than her soft bed in her home in Tuckborough… did they think she was dead there, like they’d thought Bilbo was dead when he went off for his adventure? She tilted her head to look at the stars, hoping they might drive the horrors of her dreams from her mind. Merry would tell her something smart now, if she were here, and Pippin would laugh and quip something back, and everything would be well. But Merry wasn’t here, and Pippin wondered if she’d ever see her again. It was a foolish thing to wonder, and Pippin shook it off. If Gandalf could find them again after that Balrog had dragged him down into the depths of the Earth, then Merry could strike the road to Gondor before too long. 


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elrond and Bilbo talk after the fellowship has left on their mission

The old hobbit had grown steadily more depressed since the Company had set out upon their journey. Bilbo had tried to keep it to himself, of course. He was too polite to burden his hosts with his melancholy. And besides, to admit to worry was to admit the possibilities causing worry into existence. But it was difficult for any to keep their mood a secret from Elrond, and Bilbo was particularly bad at this. He had not presented a single work of new original poetry since he’d bid farewell to his nephew, and that, even without all the other signals, was worrying. 

A fortnight after their nine had left, Elrond found him sitting in the Hall of Fire, alone, staring through the shifting flame to happier times gone by, and grim ones to come. So deep was Bilbo sunk in reverie that he didn’t notice Elrond had sat next to him upon the floor. Elrond let himself become entranced as well by the shapes the fire threw up behind itself (as the bright deeds of the past became shadows on the present, as those now living would cast themselves on the future, for good or for ill), letting his mind drift with the shapes as the scent of woodsmoke and the patterns of heat upon his face and hands grew sharper. At last he spoke, but did not turn his head. “Do you seek your nephew in this fire, Bilbo?”

The hobbit started, sniffed, and tried to cover himself with a smile and a yawn. “No, Master Elrond, just inspiration for the next chapter of my book. Do you know I’ve been rather stuck of late?”

“There is no shame in being anxious for the fate of one well loved,” said Elrond, not acknowledging the clumsy feint, “least of all in my house, for I am not free from it.”

Bilbo sighed heavily. “Yes, I suppose you are all worried here about the fate of my ring.” A branch crackled and sent a golden fleet of sparks soaring up to the opening in the roof. “If you insist on bothering me, I was thinking of the Shire, and of how… I don’t know. I love it, but I am glad I left it, and… and somehow in my eagerness to get out of it, I doomed my nephew to have to leave it behind forever, whether they will or they nil! And… I didn’t understand everything at that council of yours. I’m old and I can’t be paying attention to every little detail when you’re withholding vittals,” Elrond smiled at Bilbo’s editorializing. “But I caught some horrid talk of all the world going down into darkness forever, even the Shire, and even here, and I suppose even the blasted halls of that Elvenking and the house of Beorn and the Lonely Mountain besides…” Bilbo faltered and fell back into fretful silence. Elrond continued to watch the fire. The hobbit would continue, or he would not. A log had reached that beautiful and terrible stage where only the force of heat keeps its shape, and it is all aglow though now only ash, before he spoke again. Bilbo’s voice was small and choked. “I cannot imagine a world without green fields and tall trees and… light and happiness and beauty.”

Elrond cast his mind back, back, back, to the years so long ago when that, and dim fair memories, was all he had known of the world, when the triumph of the Enemy had been believed more assuredly than now. Yet still then, there had been hope, and beauty, and the delight of things that grew and water that fell, and even then, with so little proof, the world had been worth binding himself to, and even then, when no hope could be seen even by those who saw so far and clear, hope had come. “I could tell you, Bilbo, of the loveliness preserved inviolate in the uttermost West, that shall stand on until the breaking of this world, regardless of the fortunes of us and of our friends and of this Middle Earth, but I would wonder greatly if you could find comfort in that, for I cannot. But I have seen hopeless times.” He let his mind run past memories of wild and corrupted lands, of Amon Ereb, and of Balar before the coming of the Host out of the West, and past the slow slide of Numenor into darkness, of the tearing pain of all the world when it was drowned and the world broken, of how many had believed that that was the herald to the Dagorath, of how he had watched as Gil-Galad and then Elendil burned, and of the sailing of a ship into the West. Of these he did not speak to the old hobbit. He spoke instead of the autumn in ruined Beleriand, fair despite, in spite of, corruption, of his joy at meeting with Gil-Galad, his kinsman and his king, and bond that grew between them in what they had believed was the last darkness. He spoke also of the great pits and prisons which none had dreamed of breaking anymore thrown open to bright day. He spoke of how the thought of meeting once again his brother had warmed his heart when he thought the world was ending, and of how victory had surprised him when he thought all lost. And he spoke of the founding of Rivendell, by a handful of the survivors of blasted Eregion and of Gil-Galad’s host. “You see, a fair place such as this does not merely come to be. It is built, not with wooden beams or carven stone, but with the determination of those who make it, that even in the darkness, there will be joy. And peace. And beauty. And laughter. We could not have made Rivendell in happy times.”

Bilbo shook his head and sniffed again. “I suppose not. I suppose not. Perhaps the Shire will fall. But you say hobbits might not.” He chewed on that for some time. “I say a Rivendell run by hobbits would be a sight indeed.”

Elrond laughed at the thought. “No doubt it would include a good deal of wholesome food and a great many busy fellows scribbling away about their adventures in its creation and smoking, if you are a good example of your kind.”

“It would have a good deal of wholesome food, at least,” answered Bilbo. They fell into silence again, watching as the glowing wraith of the log burned too hot to hold its shape longer, and burst asunder into dozens of glowing coals. “You and Gandalf and all spoke of devouring fire, but I suppose you know as well as I that the best flowers grow where you dump the ashes from the hearth.”

“And so you see,” said Elrond, “That there is always hope for the world, though their may be little for us.”

At that, Bilbo snorted skeptically. He didn’t care so much about hope for the world as he did about hope for the places and people in it he knew. “But what hope is there for our friends, do you think?”

“You and I, my friend, should both sleep sounder if I had an answer for you.”


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Boromir thinks about Aragorn during the journey south

There was a rhythm to it, this furtive march south, as there hadn’t been on her solitary flight north. Boromir had found it comforting, grounding, even, at first, familiar. To rise at a certain time, to be waked for and relieved from tense and frosty watches, and all night until the thin dawn one foot relentlessly in front of the other; there had been purpose in it. But somewhere in the monotony and the endless bickering and endless observing and endless anticipating of this Strider who was Aragorn who was her rightful King, and somehow without her noticing, those steps, that rhythm had eroded her purpose and her certainty like waves upon the beach. Or perhaps it had started before that, in Imladris when the Elf had named this ranger as the lost heir of Gondor’s empty throne, when the tall and rugged woman with her insolent nonchalance, her grim pragmatism, her implacably charismatic and subtle confidence had declared that she would return with the Sword That Was Broken to deliver Boromir’s people, if she could, as if this task were both largess and a burden for her. Yes, it had started there, the slow degradation of everything she had believed in (everything, hope forbid, but Gondor) until she hardly knew who she was.

She was the heir-apparent to the Steward of Gondor. And this was her King. And it was the duty of the Steward to serve, to follow, to support the King. This supposed-King who, as far as she knew, had never been in her lands, had no love for them, who seemed to view this as some adventure, some dice roll, not something on which all,  _all_ depended, the ultimate desperate labor of the purest possible love…

And yet she follow her she must, though it split her heart, though it lead to her death. And was it not the greatest honor for any Steward, to die for their people?


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turgon learns fear

She could not quite remember the exact feeling that had pushed her into agreeing, into dragging her little family after her, first to the bloody shore, and then north, north, north, but she was sure it had not been fear. The terror that the darkness had doused them all with had, then, kindled in her rage and resolve, a need to bring the creature who had done this to them to justice. 

It had not been fear that had motivated her to hide her city when she first had done so; then she had felt that she was coiling a spring that she might strike her enemy hard and fast enough to make it flee in terror before her. 

She had trembled with rage and with grief when the eagle had brought her the mangled body of her much-beloved parent (they came swift enough to save that murderer’s wretched life, why could they not come swift enough for one so much the greater?), but not with fear. 

And when the call came to bring her people to battle, she had answered it with as high a hope as any. But she had watched, helpless, as Fingon, still living, had fallen beneath the feet of the Balrogs, as all their great hosts were blown away as leaves on a breeze before the force of the Enemy, and during her retreat, when she felt the cord of her king and sibling’s life finally snap, finally Turgon knew what it was that the rabbits felt when the hounds began a-digging.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fingon tries to help patch Maedhros up after Angband

Maedhros had awoken with a shriek Fingon had not, until then, believed an Elf capable of producing while the healers were still working on the carnage at her wrist. Her eyes blank as one asleep, she had flailed, flaps of skin and a bright needle at the end of a length of thread jerking and fluttering, blood speckling the walls, the sheets, the faces of her siblings and her helpers and her other kin. No one could get near her for fear of being raked by nails grown long like a corpse’s, bitten by broken teeth, or caught like a fish on that flying needle. Words tumbled from her mouth in Quenya and Valarin and the language of the Elves of this land and a vile language none had heard before that set their own teeth to ringing in their heads. The blood spraying from her wrist where Fingon had freed her was becoming, almost imperceptibly weaker, and much more of this would make Manwe’s mercy moot. 

Fingon reached out with her mind, as she had been too angry and too hurt to do for years, and too afraid to do for years more. Maedhros’ mind was in pieces, scattered like the shards of a vase dropped by a clumsy child, and around the bits of what had been a great and subtle spirit was something that made Fingon recoil, as she never had, from her beloved. As the cold of it fell from her body and sound and sight she had not noticed gone returned, she steadied herself. Nothing could be more fearsome than the fortress of the Moringotto itself, nothing worse than bending her bow on her beloved as she hung, reduced and brutalized, and begged for death. And both of those she had faced, and if her courage failed now Maedhros would die. 

Reaching out again, every instinct in Fingon screamed at her to run, back away, shut her mind off, yet she would not. She had faced darkness in many forms, and it held no more terror for her, or so she told herself. Yet this was the first encounter Fingon had had with Void, and all its undulating, insatiable, roaring nothingness, a devouring despair that snapped and ground and split the soul like veins of ice in rock. She could not bring light to it, could not gather the pieces and knit them back together, could not fill this nothing with herself without risking being broken and digested by it… and yet to admit these things was to give in to it, to despair, to let her beloved die after all this.

But she didn’t need Maedhros to be herself again for her to let the healers do their work so she wouldn’t bleed out, she only needed her to be still. Fingon called down fog, to reflect light and turn the darkness to gentle gray and the gaping cold nothing to and encompassing softness, dulled the roar, pulled what she could grasp down under the waves far enough that the waters were calm and nothing could be heard but the sleepy music of the depths. The pieces of Maedhros struggled and grasped at her, pulling her in and out into that awful bellowing emptiness, but she held strong.  _Doubt me not, my love,_ she urged,  _doubt the healers, doubt your life, doubt light itself, but please, please, do not doubt me._


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turgon, Idril, and Maeglin reflect on the uncertainty of Gondolin's future and their own status with each other

To say the message from the mortal was unwelcome would have captured Turgon’s sentiments as well as calling the Ice “nippy.” He would not, could not abandon this city he had built, Vala’s word be damned. This city had not been built at Ulmo’s wish, nor even for the good of those who had followed Turgon from Nevrast. His daughter had been happy in Tirion. She had had her mother, she had been safe and warm and surrounded by golden light. He had carried her across the Ice, nestled in his own furs after Elenwe had succumbed, dreading with each step the cessation of the wisps of breath against his chest. They had not come. He had watched Idril in Nevrast, watched her look West, watched her spend her days under a shadow she was not even aware of, growing toward the sea, toward a land her mother might now walk in again, as a flower grew toward light in a choked thicket. He wanted her happy again, warm and well and surrounded by golden light again, as she should be. And so he had made Tirion anew, and Idril had thrived again. He would not rip her away from all the happiness she deserved again.

–

Idril watched her father’s preparations with growing unease. She knew what she should do, as she always had. She should be the good daughter, she should supply the place of the partner he had lost where she could. She should support his endeavor, comfort him, let him know it pleased her and that he need not worry for her well-being. She had done it in Nevrast, and when he had uprooted all that would follow from his fair city and brought them here, and when her aunt had left, and again when she had returned, and when the corpse of her grandfather had been brought by Thorondor, and many other times. And yet how could she smile and reassure when he intended to wall them up, leave them with no escape, and wait in happy denial for bloody death? She had learned long ago to conceal her feelings from him so as not to inflame his grief. Concealing actions was not so much more difficult. But when the time came to run, when the hoards of the Enemy inevitably clamored over their high walls, how was she to make him follow her out?

–

Maeglin had not meant to watch his cousin with the mortal. He had not given thought to where he wandered as he walked in the garden, so neat and orderly and bright, so unlike the dark close woods of Nan Elmoth. He had been nearly upon them before he realized, and, not wishing to disturb her with his presence, had halted. He had not meant to watch. And yet a moment was enough to see that she was open and affectionate and even happy with this stranger in a way he could not even imagine her being with him. He had not meant to watch, but he had seen, as he had seen when his father would embrace and call by name and laugh with the Naugrim who would visit their woods, but would not name him, would not touch him, would not smile at him. He had learned the languages of forge and forest before he was tall enough to reach the anvil or the lowest branch without something to stand on, had studied silently the things his father loved, brought them for him or learned them, only to be sneered at for staring and for glancing slyly. He had done the same here, had made himself useful in arms, in council, in the forge and in the forest, and while they praised and valued his skill, all save his uncle were as cold and suspicious as Eol had been. He had thought it was because he was strange, and had forgiven them. But this mortal was stranger, and they embraced him, called him by name, laughed with him, as they did not with Maeglin. And yet if he could learn to make his hair fair and grow from his face, if he could make his eyes light and dim and round, his voice gruff and his manners easy, he would spend his life learning it rather than harm them. For it was obvious where the fault lay.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some shippy tragic shit featuring f!Barahir and nb!Finrod

The healers shook their heads, stared, muttered. The civilians of Nargothrond whispered and gasped. The cats fled and then peeped out wide-eyed from behind tapestries, rocks, and sconces. Barahir looked neither to one side nor the other, acknowledged no offer of help, but bore the bloodied and besmirched body of the Elvenking steadily to their chamber. A shocked and bloodless Edrahil opened the room silently, cleared the bed of its characteristic clutter, and laid a fine, clean sheet over it. Barahir gently propped Finrod up on the bed as the steward unfastened the filthy dented armor and laid it aside. The rest could be cut off. Finrod was not quite unconscious, but nor could they speak or support the weight of their own body. Barahir had expected the elf to be heavier, like one of her own kind of similar height, but it had been like carrying a bird. 

She fussed about the fire and busied herself boiling water while the healers tended to the one to whom her whole people owed their existence, their wisdom and freedom, the one who she had cradled like a sleeping child on their journey back to the hidden realm, the one who had dazzled her in her youth and compelled her in ways she could not afford to understand now. For over a week she stayed by Finrod’s bed, ignoring the glances and murmurs of healers and courtiers, grateful for Edrahil’s company in this vigil. Ever she cursed herself for not arriving sooner, not fighting the enemy off with more expediency, not hastening faster to bring Finrod to those who could treat their injuries, not shielding them better from that last arrow..

But Finrod woke, after a week, as one from a deep sleep, weak and wounded, but well, the sparkle in their strange eyes and the fey smile combining with their new palor and hollow cheeks to make them seem the more strange. Barahir wept at their feet for hours. She fretted and griped over her liege’s health, trying to hide under the gruff care of a put-upon nurse the determined yearning of her heart for her lord, like a bird in love with the moon. But Finrod was not called wise for nothing. 

Their wounds were almost healed when, checking to ensure that they had enough blankets and chasing off the latest cat to mistake the King of Nargothrond for a cushion, Barahir found a small box sitting beside Finrod’s pillow. “Open it,” said Finrod, with their unsettling combination of glee and calm, “for it is yours.” The box contained a ring, beautiful beyond words, in the shape of two golden serpents with eyes of emerald, crowned with flowers. “When the one you know as Beor and I wed, we wed after the fashion of my people. I doubted that would be as much to your liking, so I thought we might wed in the manner of yours.”

Barahir had never been much good at refusing her lord.

She was no better at shirking her duty, either to her own people or to their benefactors. She could not disappear into this glittering cave forever, not while the lands of her people were overrun with orcs and worse. Finrod arrived as she was gathering her things to return to the field. “It would not do for me to allow you to ride forth to rid your country of enemies or die in the process so ill equipped,” they said, their voice heavy with resignation. Barahir relented to having her armor, her sword, her daggers, her bow and her arrows, replaced with ones of elvish make, some forged in Nargothrond, some beyond the Sea. She bowed her head as Finrod hung the ring about her neck. Their long fingers rested upon it and they held Barahir’s gaze. “Do not hesitate to call in the debt between us, should you find yourself in need.”

Barahir brought the fingers to her lips, and kissed each ring that adorned them. “I shan’t, my lord.” 


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aredhel contemplates linguistics in Gondolin

This new land was full of new words, whole languages of them, for things Aredhel knew of already of and already had words for, and full of new words for things the definitions of which she had never thought she would have to learn. They were hard and strange, and she disliked them. They were words that had had no meaning at all in the land of her youth, or the days before the darkening. Nothing could have been meant then in Aman by  _final_ , and  _consequence_ lacked the grim and icy implacability with which it now bit.

And then there was  _cage_. It had been a harmless thing for the beasts and birds they tamed, rarely necessary and always temporary. Here it was akin to  _snare_ or  _trap_  and was neither temporary nor reserved for fauna. And she realized as she gazed out at the stern ring of mountains surrounding this new city, that such a thing described where she found herself, and where she would remain. It could not be borne. It would not be borne. The bars were not so close yet that she could not slip them, and nothing held the latch but the will of a brother. She need not bear it, and so she would not.


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Celegorm and Curufin talk after Celebrimbor renounces them. R63 Curufin and Celebrimbor.

Celegorm knew his sister’s rhythm in the forge like he knew his own heartbeat, and knew he would find her not in the hall of the king, nor in her own chambers, nor those of her wayward spawn, but here, in Nargothrond’s smithy. He didn’t blame her. He would have been on the hunt, given the opportunity. There was nothing for clarity, nothing for finding one’s path in the choking fog of disappointments like returning to one’s craft. Curufin’s back was turned to the entrance. She made no acknowledgement of his entrance, though he knew she was aware of him. Celegorm skirted the anvil, trying for a glimpse of her face, but her hair hung loose about it, uncharacteristically free from its usual austere knot. She didn’t want him to see her face, which meant she had wept, though doubtless now she had composed herself. He leaned against the wall of the smithy, crossing his arms over his chest and waited for some sign from her.

After she had heated, beaten, and cooled whatever she was making twice, he could no longer hold his silence. “Curvo,”

Her hammer fell with a harsh, methodical clang, like the tolling of some sinister metronome.

“Curvo, this is not the time.”

Her hammer strokes managed to both ignore and contradict his assessment. Celegorm was used to her giving Maglor such treatment, but he had never been on the receiving end of his sister’s cutting silence. 

“Curvo, Orodreth is calling the council, minus us. The word is he plans to force a vote and expel us.”

A violent hiss as the metal hit the cooling pail again. Re-situating the metal in the fire, Curufin asked, as she might have asked him to pass her a tool, “And Tyelperinquar?”

Celegorm fidgeted uneasily and cleared his throat. “Tyelperinquar has not left our cousin’s side since yesterday.”

Curufin pulled the glowing metal from the fire and laid it again upon the anvil as if she had not heard.

“Curvo, if we don’t act we’ll lose–”

“What?” She rounded on him at last, her face cold and drawn, a grotesque, a horrid image of their father’s as it had been at Losgar. “What will we lose, Celegorm? You were, I think, going to name something that would actually  _merit_  action to keep, weren’t you? And yet for my single self I can think of nothing in this…” she paused, letting her arch glance slide about the smithy as she searched for the appropriate epithet, “anthill, to mourn the loss of.”

“Curvo, your daught–”

“Nor any one, save my most loyal and worthy brother, whose judgement seems to have been clouded by the soft and easy comforts of this coward’s kingdom.”

“Curufinwe!”

“Tyelper– Celebrimbor,” she corrected herself with a dripping emphasis, “has made her choice.” Curufin returned to her creation, and the rhythm began again as if it had never been interrupted.

The image of Feanor’s highlighted against the dark shore and the dark sea and the dark sky by the smoldering ships, cursing their brother for a traitor and a coward, hovered over his sister, so like to their father. Celegorm had never thought too like before. And yet he had trusted their father then, and he trusted his sister now. He had sneered at the waste their youngest brother had made of himself then, and so he sneered at the waste his niece made of herself now. “I’ll pack our things,” he said, and turned to go. Curufin did not break her rhythm.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fingon and Maedhros try to work things out post-canon in Valinor

“I shouldn’t forgive you,” said Fingon, staring pointedly at a crag of the far-distant Pelori.

“You shouldn’t,” agreed Maedhros.

“You have done things beyond any forgiveness.”

“I have.”

“And you do not deserve to be at liberty, much less accepted amongst your peers.”

“I don’t,” affirmed Maedhros, leaving out the addendum that really, in terms of wickedness, she was quite peerless, at least within the circles of the world.

“And on top of that I am still very angry with you.”

“Oh I should certainly hope so,” Maedhros retorted. “I should quite despair of your morality and self respect were you not.”

Fingon chewed her lip furiously for long enough for the shadows to change, a betrayal of memory and grim reminder that returning was an empty word. Maedhros waited for Fingon to break her own silence. She had long ago lost the need to fill time with words. “You’ve fixed it all up quite nicely. I suspect you are proud of yourself, concocting this little paradox,” Fingon muttered, bitterness creeping into the corners of her speech.

“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” said Maedhros, for she truly didn’t.

Fingon scoffed. “Forgive you, and I prove that I am a soft-hearted fool who cares more for her own affections than the suffering or well-being of countless others. Condemn you, and I show myself cold and hypocritical. Either way my character is forfeit.”

“Such suspicion does not suit you.”

“No more perhaps than the blood of the young and the frail suits you.”

Maedhros weighed whether or not it would be well to make the next point before throwing the calculation whole-cloth to the winds. If they were to recover who they had been before, if they were to move past what they had become, they must put aside the bitter lessons of oaths and ice and war and captivity and death suffered and inflicted. “You need not approach the question like a king, Fingon. As you may have noticed, you are one no longer.”

Fingon whirled about to face her but said nothing, and Maedhros watched the fury fight itself out on her fair face until all that was left was weary frustration. “You were not so wicked when we were young. Some say you were, but I would have known. And you were not so wicked after I freed you. Some said you were, but I would have known. So was it me, or was it convenience? For I cannot, though I wish I could, believe it was Morgoth.”

“You are asking if I am only decent when it benefits me to be so?”

“Among other things,” said Fingon tightly.

It was a question Maedhros had wrestled with long in the darkness of the Halls of Waiting. She did not have an answer that she liked, and so Fingon would have to make do with one she didn’t. “I had promised myself to the void, and unlike my siblings I had felt its touch. I could have turned aside, I knew so at the time, but it was difficult to remember, and it was difficult to face the price.”

“So your defense is that you are a coward.” Fingon sniffed in grief and repulsion. “That I knew. Before I gave myself to you, I knew that much. And so I was a fool to hope it would not always be so, and that is the simple distillation of all this.”

“No.”

“No?”

“It was not foolishness that called down Thorondor, and it was not cowardice to defy one of the Powers. Grant I may be cowardly, grant you may be foolish, but I am not simply a coward and you are not simply a fool.”

“What else would you call someone who longs to forgive the most infamous murderer our kind has ever produced?”

Maedhros braced herself, and put aside another habit learned in pain and fear and bared her spirit to the one beside her. “I would call them wise in hope.”


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elrond reflects on mortality and immortality in the wake of Numenor's destruction

The world was cracked, worse than cracked, broken like a limb and set improperly, leaving a permanent disfigurement. Perhaps it would always have ended thus. Perhaps it had been inevitable from the raising out of that once-fair isle in the midst of the sea. Perhaps Elrond should have stopped his brother from accepting the offer of the powers. Perhaps if they’d heeded the warnings that were in the examples of their parents and their erstwhile caretaker-kidnappers of the capriciousness of the Powers…

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

It was the burden of foresight, to be able to see the possibilities, but not which one would befall, to be able to trace back to the moment when the last chance to turn aside was offered, and to be left with the awful twin knowledge that it did not have to end this way and that there was no other way it could have ended. At least Elros did not have to see, did not have to know, what had happened to his island and his people, did not have to know that his legacy was now one of oppression, of pain inflicted on the world, of arrogance, and, finally, of failure. Perhaps that was the true gift of the Atani, to not have to see the consequences of their actions through to their denouement millennia later, to flee in death from not just the world but knowledge of their mark on it.

Perhaps Elrond had chosen wrong. There would be no escape from this pain, this knowledge, this ringing absence for him in death, for there was no fleeing from the world. He would continue. 

When he was much younger, he had tied himself to this world in defiance and in hope. He had not understood then, though perhaps he should have, and perhaps Elros had, what their keepers tried to tell him with every breath, every glance, every gesture: that the world, and living in it, were cruel mistresses, that there was nothing harder than bearing the consequences of believing in living.


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Celebrimbor thinks about the implications of disowning his father

 

It was unnatural. No one Celebrimbor had ever known, no Elf he had ever heard of, had done such a thing. And yet. And yet, and yet and yet and yet and yet. He could not think the word “father” without bile rising in his throat to choke him. And yet, if he had  _not_  been the first, might his own sire, might his uncles, not have been saved from this grotesque twisting?

And twisting it was. Twisted, it would be. He would be. His blood felt like the metal on the doors to Formenos after Melkor’s defilement. This was his father, who had given him life, who had nurtured him, who had taught him and prized him.

And yet this was his father, who had stolen him away under false pretenses, who had slain his own kin without remorse, stranded closer kin in deadly peril, and now, who had humiliated and stolen the life’s work of one who had sheltered them in a time of peril, who had thrown ice water on the courage of every heart in Nargothrond, who had conspired to commit worse offenses and only been saved by his own victim’s cunning.

It would have been easier if he could say this was not his father, as the Edain, whose memory did not extend far enough back to confirm, and who had no sense of blood-bond, could in such circumstances. It would be easier if he could say, as some Nandor could, that this was not his father, but a wraith that wore his skin. It would be easier if he could excise his father like a cancer, like a diseased limb.

It would be easier to swallow his conscience and follow. But he could not, not now that he had seen the hollowness behind the shining exterior that still looked the part of Feanor’s namesake. He could see through the husk, to the worm-eaten interior. This was his father, who gave him life, who taught him, who nurtured him, who loved him. He wanted this to be his father still. But this was a fiend in his father’s shape, a corruption that the Enemy had never had to touch. And he could follow no longer, lest he wished to fall to the contagion that had devoured the rest of his lineage from the inside out. He would do it with the dawn. He would be the first of his kind to look one half of those who made him in the eyes and renounce the claim they should have on each other for shame of his father’s actions. And he would do it before all of Nargothrond, lest any should be tempted to be less brave.

But for tonight, he would remember his father as he had been, beyond the sea, and he would weep.


	25. Chapter 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aredhel doesn't adjust to death well

Death, Aredhel found, was not so very different from captivity. Neither held a set date of release, and though it could always arrive at any point, as her tenure lengthened her hope for escape dwindled. Each cultivated both restlessness and lethargy, and put her mind in a morbid and melancholy bent. She had desired and sought neither, and yet in both cases it was her actions that had landed her here. And each was achingly, endlessly, boring.

She had waited in the dark halls of Eol for her lethargy to lift, for the sun to set, for her captor-husband to return; she had waited to fall asleep, waited for the seasons to change, but waited, always, as a bow waits on a shelf to be strung, as a hawk waits in its jesses for the hunt.

And now she waited for another endless doom to be lifted by another grim and implacable captor who blamed her for crimes of being rather than of doing. 

And she hated being bored. It had gotten her into trouble since she could first remember, her inability to sit still, to not touch, to not wander to parts unknown. It had driven her from the shores of Aman, from her brother’s walled city, from Himlad, from Eol’s halls, and now here, to the ultimate cage, where she must wait until the ending of the world. How dull.

The lesson she was supposed to learn from all this was obvious, but she had decided shortly upon arrival that she would not learn it. Looking before she leaped was not in her blood. And no amount of caution and deliberation had saved Turgon. If she would be dead either way, she might as well have had an adventure to show for it. The trick, she decided, would be not to be caught next time. For there would assuredly be a next time, whether the Doomsman felt inclined to grant her one or not.


	26. Chapter 26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elrond deals with Arwen's death

The twins had set sail. They would arrive in the rambling and nebulous span of time that it took to sail to the edge of the world and out of it, longer if they took their usual detours to explore. Elrond's heart had lept with a joy and a relief he had forgotten he was capable of. At least this loss they would not have to bear. The worst of best outcomes wouldn’t come to pass. Their children would soon arrive, and Celebrian’s grief would lift, and for the first time in many lifetimes, their family would be complete.

His family would be complete, for the first time since his youngest days.

It took longer than it should have for him to remember that there would be only two on the ship. Not three. 

Neither he nor his wife had felt Arwen’s death, though if their sons were sailing west it must have happened. She had slipped gradually beyond their reckoning since she had made her Choice, her presence sliding away like sand in a glass. It had been so with Elros, but when Elros had died and left the circles of the world, Elrond had been there. And if Arwen was dead, then she was not the only child he had lost, for she could not have preceded Estel out of the world.

And so the story repeated itself, as it always had, always did, always would. There was attachment and love followed by loss followed by grief, which was chased away by new attachment and new love which gave way to new loss, as fall followed every summer and as every winter was vanquished by a new spring, on and on and on. Yet some winters were more bitter than others, and the certainty of a new spring could not always lift the spirit as the nights lengthened. The old hobbits, with whom he had spent much time since their arrival on these far shores, had expressed delight when they realized that here, in this strange land where death did not walk, every plant they had tended the year before would, without fail, sprout anew in the spring. Such had not been the way of it in Middle Earth, and Samwise in particular regaled many an Amanyar Elf with sorrowful stories of lovingly sown beds of daffodils that had been blighted by a late and hard frost.

The Amanyar would shake their heads with horror and call it the marring of the Morgoth. But could it be called so when the loss had been built into the foundation of existence not by the marrer, but by Iluvatar?

Their sons would be here soon, and Celebrian would see her children once more, and be well again. And yet how could their presence not highlight the permanent absence of their daughter? 


End file.
